Chancellor Merkel’s Double Vision

By Jan Techau

Sept. 19, 2013

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CreditCreditJohannes Eisele/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Angela Merkel has a reputation as something of an enigma. Biographers, commentators and political opponents have created a cottage industry of Merkel astrology around a leader that everyone finds hard to read.

With a general election scheduled in Germany for Sunday, a poll at which the chancellor is likely to win a mandate for a third term, speculation is rife about Merkel’s political course, especially on foreign policy.

But contrary to widely held beliefs, the chancellor’s positions are in fact not all that difficult to identify. Merkel has basically made three fundamental decisions that have defined the structure of her foreign policy.

The first decision was to ensure that Germany rejected any kind of geopolitical ambition. The country has been a very useful enabler of the European Union’s foreign policy in the Western Balkans, but it has shied away from strengthening Europe’s diplomatic or military capabilities in more substantial, structural ways.

The same is true for NATO, where Germany has forwarded a number of initiatives on technical issues, but is seen as disengaged from the bigger strategic discourse on the future of the Western alliance in a changing global security landscape.

Merkel has, unenthusiastically, heeded old German military commitments in Afghanistan and Kosovo, but she has kept Germany firmly out of entanglements in the new type of crisis-management operation that is emerging from the crises in Libya, Mali and Syria. In all of this she can feel safely in agreement with the overwhelming majority of the German public.

In the absence of larger, more global ambitions, what matters most in assessing Merkel’s foreign policy are her decisions in relation to Europe. This is where the crisis of the European single currency has forced her, against her instincts, to become a decisive player and a risk-taker. It is in this field that Merkel’s other two fundamental foreign policy decisions fall, and it is here that her foreign policy legacy will be defined.

Her second decision was to turn the euro zone into a de facto “transfer union lite” by guaranteeing the currency’s survival with pledges of billions of German taxpayer euros. In return, she has since been pushing for immediate structural economic reforms in the recipient countries, combined with medium- to long-term projects such as fiscal union and joint oversight instruments like the European Stability Mechanism.

A banking union is still in limbo but might complete the picture in the not-so-distant future. All of these efforts have one thing in common: more or less strict oversight over a nation’s financial and economic policies. None of this would have been thinkable only a few years ago.

This means, in simple terms, that Merkel has presided over a substantial deepening of E.U. economic integration. With the measures she has taken to remedy the crisis now firmly in place, the European Union has integrated faster and more substantially than in any previous five-year period. True, most of this has not been wholly voluntarily. Much of it was dictated by the crisis. But in the end, it was largely Merkel who designed or enabled these great integrationist leaps forward.

Merkel’s third decision is perhaps the most fateful one. The German chancellor has determined that she favors a politically less integrated Europe after the crisis. In August, she announced in a radio interview that now was the time to think about giving some powers back from Brussels to the member states.

She did not go into specifics, but added that Europe, from now on, would not necessarily require more common policies with decisions made by the Brussels-based institutions. Improved governance could be achieved through better coordination among member states.

This victory for Merkel’s long-standing intergovernmental instincts over an age-old German pro-integration tradition is nothing less than revolutionary, particularly when compared with the ideology of Helmut Kohl, under whose tutelage she entered the political stage. Perhaps it is meant to counterbalance the enormous push toward closer economic integration. But it is clear that, again, Merkel has allied herself with the majority of Germans who think that Europe’s economic side is great, but that its political side is increasingly sinister.

Merkel’s third decision is risky. First of all, it rests on the flawed assumption that economic and political integration can be separated from each other, when the basic lesson of the euro crisis is that you can’t have one without the other.

Second, it fatefully ties her to the politically weakened British prime minister, David Cameron, who shares her vision of “repatriating” many government functions and favoring intergovernmental deal-making over the E.U.’s classic community method, but whose inability to control his own party is causing him existential problems at home.

Third, Merkel’s decision rips the very engine out of the entire integration idea: that Germany, Europe’s historically problematic core country, underwrites the ever-fragile idea of European politics transcending the merely national.

Of Merkel’s three fundamental foreign policy decisions, strategic abstention is understandable but unsustainable in the long run; her recipe to tackle the crisis is probably correct but could create severe collateral damage; and her intergovernmental turn revolutionizes the integration project by risking some of its historic achievements.

Expect Merkel’s post-election foreign policy to be built around these three foundations. If it works out, which it could, it is pure genius. If not, generations from now, historians will wonder what drove that enigmatic woman.